How traces of dust found by a squad dog helped police identify a murder suspect

While traveling home in Northeast Delhi in August 2017, a six-year-old kid vanished from sight. After filing a missing person complaint with the Delhi Police, his father, a tea shop owner, created many teams to locate the guilty.

The child’s body was found inside a local childcare facility the following afternoon, with evident signs of strangulation. The child was reportedly sodomized before being killed, according to a medical investigation.

Authorities were clueless about the potential culprit for over a month: door-to-door searches yielded no results, and the boy’s disappearance occurred in a remote area, making it impossible to examine CCTV footage.

However, after almost three weeks, on September 1, 10-year-old Vinesh, a Labrador from the Delhi Police’s K9 squad, was sent to work with the Northeast district’s crime team. The dog was brought to the scene of the crime and then encouraged to scent the clothes that the dead boy was wearing when it happened.

“Vineesh immediately took the police team to an under-construction site in the area where he started sniffing the security guard’s enclosure,” an officer stated after smelling the victim’s clothes for dust.

After questioning the supervisor of the location, the police team learned that Ram Niwas, a 40-year-old security guard, had not been seen since August 11—the day of the incident.

Officers were dispatched to his native Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, to conduct raids at potential hiding places. But later on, they got a tip that he was indeed in Delhi. Here in Mandoli, close to the cremation cemetery, Niwas was apprehended.

Niwas admitted to the police during questioning that he was friends with the victim’s cousin and that they used to share drinks at the construction site after their separate shifts. 

When the building site was closed on August 11 for the entire day, Niwas and his friend once more drank alcohol before leaving at 8:00 p.m. 

“At approximately 8:15 p.m., the accused, who was inebriated, summoned the youngster over after noticing that he was approaching his home. The young child was sodomized by him, and when he threatened to tell his father, he strangled him and left him at a nursery some two kilometers away from the scene before he ran away, according to AK Singla, the DCP (Northeast) at the time.

According to the police, Niwas was also involved in a case similar to this one in 2009, when he was accused of kidnapping and killing another six-year-old boy because of a money dispute with the youngster’s family. According to police, he was later placed under arrest and granted bail in connection with the case.

Currently, the Karkardooma court is hearing the case and is in the final arguments stage. Niwas is being held by judges.